burntwater

I was pretty diligent about checking all of that... but there was one part that I failed to check... OBJECT TEMPLATES. (I had planned to customize those later but had left them alone because I had assumed it wouldn't be a problem. Silly me.) As per your PM, I ran an error check in FO4Edit and it noted some weird discrepancies down in the Combination entries in the Object Templates, little memory errors like "expected 1 kb, found 0". To be on the safe side, I went through and deleted all the Object Templates for every single custom armor piece. Lo and behold, my mod now let's me load the game to the menu! My best guess is that somehow copying the entries over (in FO4Edit) caused weird data corruptions in the file but just in the Object Templates. Or something, I don't know. It's so weird. At any rate, I think we've found the solution! Thank you icestormng for your help and guidance! So anyway, dup3w4sh1ngt0n, I hope this gives you an idea of how/where to check your mod for errors.

Appreciate that! I sent you a PM. In case anyone else is reading this thread, I found it interesting that the only ARMO entry that could remain and not cause a pre-menu CTD, was the one overwrite of a base game item. Only the new, mod-specific ARMO entries caused CTDs. Also, these new entries began life as vanilla items that I "copied as new records" into my mod and then customized and linked to their new AA. It feels a bit like I've hijacked this thread, sorry! I just felt like, since our issues seemed so similar, we could help each other pin-point the source of our errors. :D

That's what I was thinking too. By way of experiment, I uninstalled all meshes, materials and textures associated with my problem mod and created two versions of the ESP: One with the MSWP entries removed and one with all the AA and ARMO entries removed. The result? The ESP with only the armor entries gave me a CTD whereas the ESP with only the MSWPs allowed the game to load to menu. I then created a fresh pair of ESPs, one with the AA entries removed and one with ARMO entries removed. The ESP without ARMO entries was the only one to load to menu. I then loaded up my original mod in FO4Edit with all other ESM/ESL/ESPs to see if it finds any errors/conflicts. Zip, nada, nothing. Bleagh. Now to go through all my dozens of ARMO entries to find which is the problem child. BLEAGH. CONCLUSION: It's not the materials or the material swaps! Anyway, dup3w4sh1ngt0n, I hope this helps you narrow down your problem too. It's likely not your materials but maybe like me it's a form ID conflict? EDITED TO UPDATE: So, it's not the form ids. I deleted each one, one-by-one and the only thing that works is if there aren't any entries in ARMO. I even "copied as new record" every item and deleted the old items (thereby giving them all fresh new IDs) however that didn't work. I'm at a complete loss. I can't for the life of me imagine what the conflict would be. It's not a master issue, a form ID conflict, not a mesh or texture issue, XEdit/Wrye Bash/Loot say everything is fine... It's in the ESP but I have no idea what it is about those entries that would make it CTD the game on start-up.

I'm having an eerily similar problem with a mod I've made. It too is just a simple armor mod that adds Armor Keywords and Armorsmith compatibility with color material swaps. With the my mod active, Fallout 4 CTD's before the menu appears. Everything I've read says this indicates a missing master file. However, all my masters are there (I have all the DLC too)! I've examined my mod in FO4Edit, Loot, and Wrye Bash and none of them find anything wrong with its masters. Until I saw your post, it never occurred to me it could be the MSWPs. I have no idea how that could cause on-load CTD but it's worth investigating. Hopefully someone else can comment with insight to help us both. Until then though, I'll keep experimenting and will report back if I learn anything.